The Humanity of Patience

It’s Election Day! We are all overwhelmed with news about the immediate present. Certainly the next two years of our nation’s life will be shaped by the election results. How about our own personal lives?

To some of my relatives, today’s politics don’t matter. Vera, 13 months old, and Leo, 10 months old, remain blissfully unaware of Democrats and Republicans, Congress and the President, who’s winning and who’s losing. They are in the middle of a uniquely human phase of life – extended childhood.

Humans develop very slowly. Humans are the slowest of animals to learn to walk: a newborn horse can walk within an hour after birth. My granddaughter has just learned to walk at one year and running will come much later. She can’t talk, although she can communicate many simple desires.

Human brains are much less developed at birth than the smaller brains of other animals, because the human birth canal is too narrow to allow fully developed big brains to pass through. Much of our brain development comes after birth, allowing us tremendous adult brain capacity, but requiring years of dependence on adults.

Years will pass before Vera and Leo are ready for school. Most human societies across the globe plan a dozen years of schooling before we assume that our young are ready to be self-sufficient. So-called advanced societies plan another 4 years or more of schooling to prepare for more complex professions. Years and years of slow development and preparation to become physically, mentally and psychologically ready to be adult humans.

We might say that humans develop at a snail’s pace, but some snails are sexually mature at 6 weeks old. Humans must develop skills far beyond what any other animals are capable of, such as speech. Both the complexity of human society and the biological nature of the human animal contribute to the long years of development. This slow maturation is uniquely human.

We make an enormous investment of time into the growth of our children. Observing my granddaughter and her parents day after day, I realize how important is patience to human life. Nothing seems to change from day to day. The same tasks and lessons are repeated countless times before they appear to have any effect. Negative lessons, like not touching hot things or pulling men’s beards, have to be repeated hundreds of times before they are learned. The whole process depends on unending patience.

It’s ironic that good parenting depends on patience, but our constant efforts to urge patience on our babies are useless. When they are hungry or tired, when they want to be picked up or put down, get out of their strollers or clothes, or generally do that thing that is inconvenient for adults, we say “Wait a minute. Have patience. Soon.” But the words are meaningless. Patience is the long game and babies can only think of now. Like other adult qualities, patience develops very slowly.

Patience is not just useful in dealing with children. It also helps us deal with the world’s problems. To build a better world for Vera and Leo and all of our babies, we must patiently find good solutions.

But patience has its limits. Sometimes patience is a code word for doing nothing. During the Civil Rights era, after centuries of white tyranny over black Americans, whites in power kept saying, “Not so fast. Patience.” In that case, reasonable patience had long ago run out.

Our children will face a difficult world, if we don’t take action now to counteract climate change. We have let the time for patience slip by. If we keep doing nothing, by the time that Vera and Leo are ready to have children of their own, rising seas will have inundated our coasts, storms of unprecedented power will have battered our homes, crops will fail around the world, people will die of the heat.

We need patience to raise the next generation of human beings. We need action to insure that their lives are as good as they can be.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

November 6, 2018

The Problem Is Not Civility

A man tried to assassinate the former President, the former Vice President, the former Attorney General, the most recent candidate for the Presidency, a Congresswoman and a Senator. Even a partial success would have been the worst political assassination plot in American history. Alert law enforcement agents and postal workers prevented anyone from being hurt.

Before the mad bomber was identified, prominent conservatives asserted without the slightest evidence that the bombs were fakes, planted by Democrats to tarnish Republicans. This “false flag” theory first surfaced at the fringes of right-wing media. That’s not surprising, but soon well-known conservative opinion leaders jumped on this nasty bandwagon. Ann Coulter tweeted, “bombs are a liberal tactic.” Rush Limbaugh said on his program, “What sense does it make for a conservative Republican to gum up the works here by sending a bunch of bombs that are not gonna go off and that are gonna be discovered? It doesn’t make any sense in any way, shape, manner, or form.” Fox TV host Lou Dobbs wrote, “Fake News – Fake Bombs. Who could possibly benefit by so much fakery?” FOX guest “experts” on three different shows echoed this idea. Donald Trump Jr. liked a tweet that asserted “FAKE BOMBS MADE TO SCARE AND PICK UP BLUE SYMPATHY VOTE.”

What did our President do? He never mentioned the names of the victims of this attack or expressed any sympathy with them. He complained about how media coverage of this potential tragedy interfered with coverage of his campaigning, in which he encouraged his supporters to hate the people targeted by the assassin. “We have seen an effort by the media in recent hours to use the sinister actions of one individual to score political points against me and the Republican Party,”

Countless writers have identified a lack of civility as one of our country’s worst problems. They complain about the nasty tone adopted by politicians and pundits of the left and right. They assert that the problem is a national one.

No. The problem is that a few prominent conservative opinion leaders, headed by our President, have gone way beyond incivility to hatred. When the lives of the most prominent Democrats are threatened, they blame the victims. They express no satisfaction that the plot was foiled nor sympathy for the intended victims. They don’t care that lives can be disrupted, even if bombs don’t go off. Days later, none of these commentators has admitted that they were wrong to blame Democrats.

And then they go right back to shouting that liberals are terrorists and encourage terrorists. That liberals are a “mob” which endangers the country. That the very people targeted by the bomber are a danger to the country and must be stopped.

No wonder the gullible Trump supporters echo these stupid ideas, and believe the arrest of a Trump supporter is part of the hoax. They have been bombarded by Republican attacks on the morality and the patriotism of liberals for decades. Their fears have been stoked by conservative lies about liberals since the days of Sen. McCarthy. A FOX producer called it “riling up the crazies”. Now a pathetic march of frightened Central Americans has been turned into an invasion of disease-carrying terrorists.

Let’s put the responsibility where it belongs – the supposedly serious, well known people who propagate these ideas and then take no responsibility for them when they are shown to be lies.

Incivility means rudeness or bad manners. Trump and his prominent acolytes are engaged in hate speech, incitement to violence. On the midterm campaign trail, Trump’s regular speech labels Democrats as a danger to America. They are “arsonists” who “have become too extreme and too dangerous to govern.” They want to “tear down our laws, tear down our institutions in pursuit of power.” They “want to unleash violent predators and ruthless killers.” “The Democrat party has become an angry, ruthless, unhinged mob determined to get power by any means necessary.” “The Democrats are willing to do anything, to hurt anyone, to get the power they so desperately crave. They want to destroy.”

When some Americans believe their President and believe the people who appear on television news, it becomes a reasonable choice to fear and hate all liberals.

Cesar Sayoc may have made his bombs alone. But prominent conservatives from the President on down urged him to believe his targets were enemies of the people. Trump and Coulter and Limbaugh and FOX are unindicted co-conspirators in the biggest political assassination plot in modern American history.

Lock them up.

Steve Hochstadt

Boston

October 30, 2018

A Man For All Men?

Suppose you just met a man at a party, in a bar, at a meeting, or at a ball game. He talked only about himself. He told amazing stories about how wonderful and rich he was. He said he was a genius, one of the most successful businessmen in the world, and superior at everything he does. He commented on how attractive or unattractive the women around him were and bragged about his sexual exploits. He laughed about getting away with groping women he encountered. He made fun of the intelligence of well-known people. He made fun of the handicapped. Although flabby and overweight, he puffed up his chest praising men who were “tough” like him.

Then later you found out that his stories about himself were lies. That he cheats at golf. That he had cheated everyone he worked with and conned his customers. That he had cheated on his wives. And that his wealth was not earned, but given to him by his very wealthy father.

What would you say about this man? A man you would not trust with a dollar. A man from whom you would want to protect the women in your life. There’s one word which sums up this personality – asshole.

Even assholes can be nice sometimes. Maybe such a man could show compassion in his interactions with others and empathy for those less fortunate. Maybe with more public responsibility, he could become more responsible. Maybe he would show another side of his personality.

But we have observed Donald Trump for two years since his election, and he has escalated his repellent behavior. His lies have multiplied, even about facts that can be easily checked. He mocks women, their bodies, and their stories of abuse by men. He refuses to believe people who know more than he does. He encourages people to hate the press, to hate his political opponents.

He is now the most famous asshole in the world.

Some people support the political policies Trump pushes and some people don’t. But nobody could argue that Trump the man is anything but an asshole. And that means that it is worth taking a second look at those policies, because such a man cannot be trusted to do what he says. A clear example is secretly using a heartless policy of separating children from their parents as a way of dealing with asylum seekers, then denying it ever happened, then blaming it on Democrats, then imprisoning children in barracks without sufficient facilities, then defying court orders to reunite families, then admitting that they had not kept track of what they were doing.

That’s what it means to have an asshole as President.

American women have recognized how Trump’s true nature contaminates his policies. Nearly two-thirds of women disapprove of Trump. Although 84% of women who identify as Republican say they support Trump, fewer and fewer women identify as Republican now that Trump is President.

What about men? Men split nearly evenly between approval and disapproval of Trump. It’s not black men or Hispanic men, but white men who support Trump.

Men who want to protect the women in their families from guys like Trump, men who believe in honesty, who dislike braggarts, who don’t think worrying about getting venereal disease is comparable to fighting in Vietnam, who don’t accept a draft-dodger’s claims that he knows more about war than our generals – they still applaud Trump.

Conservative white men overwhelmingly support Trump. Don’t conservative values count for anything?

Trump isn’t on the ballot anywhere, but he says over and over again that this election is about him.

White men, what are you doing? Don’t vote for a sleazy liar, for an abuser of women, for a con man. Pay attention to what women around you think. Have some pride in being a man.

Send this message to every man you know. Proclaim it from the rooftops.

Don’t vote for the asshole!

Steve Hochstadt

Boston

October 23, 2018